devhacks is a personal blog and reflects the ideas and opinions of subhash pant and not his employer, professor, dog, shoes, or stapler.
Wondering which page you are in for a keyword? Try this tool called Google Webmaster Tool. This tool allows you to see where you are placed for targetted keywords, and whether you even show up in google for specific keyword. I, for a long time, have wondered how I’d know which page I am listed in Google for a specific word. After months and months of serach, I found this tool which finally solved the problem.
Last time, I happened to purchase a hosting account from Hostgator. This hosting account allowed me to host unlimited domains names, gave me unlimited bandwidth and it is powered by CPANEL. It has all the features in the CPANEL including Addon Domains, and most importantly Fantastico. This very feature allows you to install most commonly used open source applications for free of cost in a fly.
If you want to sign up, click on the link:
I decided to write a post about how to do a SEO to your Wordpress blog. I have complied list of plugins which helps you perform the blog. Last time my blog was up, I got around 40 visitors everyday for my post about Toshiba’s failed bios update. It really motivated me to write more posts and come visit my blog everyday to answer questions. After bluehost turned it down due to missed payment, I went to them and tried to make a payment to the hosting plan, in a condition that my database was intact. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. I don’t blame them so much as they have provided me with good service for a long time, that too for a resonable cost. Anywho, getting back to the Wordpress SEO, here are the basic ones:
1) For your permalinks, I would recommend doing something like this:
/%category%/%postname%
This greately helps your blog because your content gets displayed with keyword rich directoy structure.
2) I have found this wonderful plugin called: All in One SEO Pack. It allows me to write different title, keywords, meta tags and also change my URL structure according to my needs. This makes URL’s easy to remember and readable by search engines.
3) Use a plugin to generate XML sitemap. The one that I am currently using is called:
XML-Sitemap. It does everything but generate a sitemap by it’s own. I don’t understand this and still have to test this, but thats what the documentation says.
4) Use a tool which allows people to post your article into different social networking websites like delicious and so on.
5) Use a plugin so that your RSS feeds get displayed in feedburner.
I will add more to the content as I find out more. Thanks for reading.
If any of you guys out there have tried to update the BIOS and failed in between, having the laptop dead, here are a few things you need to do in order to bring it back to life. It happened to my new Toshiba Satellite A135… and I did not get a good respose from Toshiba. The customer service guy was very rude to me and kept on asking me why I tried to do a BIOS update.
My system runs Windows Vista Home Premium version. Looking at the instability with certain application, I thought there would be a problem if I try to update the BIOS. After reading the instructions and confirming that it was an update designed for Windows Vista, I downloaded it, turned off all the application and tried to run it. After a few minutes, I got the “Program not responding” message and when I tried to restart the computer, everything was dead. I had to dismantle the battery in order to switch off the power. After I pressed the power button again, there was nothing. No hard drive lights and blank screen. Myself in deep pressure for screwing up the property. Here is what you could do if so happens to you.
1) Get the Crisis Recovery Disk Tool.
2) Get a floppy drive and format the drive using this tool.
3) The program will copy three files on it. One of them, BIOS.WPH, has to be replaced with your BIOS file. In order to get your BIOS file, go to your manufacturer’s website, download the latest BIOS available, and look for the file which has .ROM extension. Rename this to BIOS.WPH and replace the one on the disk drive.
4) Get a USB floppy drive for your laptop (dead laptop I mean) and attach it. Put the disk inside.
5) Take off your battery and the power chord.
6) Press FN + B or Win + B
7) Keep pressing those 2 keys and put in your battery.
8 ) Keep pressing those 2 keys and put in the power chord.
9) Keep pressing those 2 keys and press the power button (Do not leave those 2 keys yet).
10) After you are sure that the floppy is being read, leave those keys. Remember, in this mode, nothing will be displayed in the screen and the color of power button lights might be something different. Also, the fan will run unsually at a higher speed and it will make a lot of noise.
11) Leave the computer for 10 minutes after it stoped reading the floppy (this is the reflashing process).
12) Restart the computer after 10 minutes. I had to take out my battery to do it because the power button wasn’t working to well.
13) Your computer should be back to life. If you have any questions regarding this, try to post it in comment and I will be more than happy to help you.
P.S. Thanks to Mr. Amit who cared to stay up with me and helped me find the software.. and helped me through the instructions..
This article reflects my personal experience to make Google Apps, especially Google Mail work on my client’s website. I will discuss my experience about my old MTA, SpamAssassin, Bayes Algorithm, problems and my decision to switch to Google Apps.
Each day, my client received around 100 spam emails. I enabled the SpamAssassin in the mail server and that tagged most of the emails as spams the first day. As days went buy, I realized that all the email add of spammers had changed. So, I decided to train the Spam Assassin (Bayes Algorithm). At some point, that failed too. I was looking for a solution where I could filter out spams in a different inbox, and still have a look at them once a day. The competitive solution costs around $4,000. So we decided to move to Google Apps.
The first problem was that I made all the changes as suggested by Google in my DNS (mx settings). That solved the problem for a little bit, but I saw my redirected emails (email groups) being delivered to the old mail server. Google had a bunch of settings that I had to put differently in order to make it work. On server management side, I am running Plesk 7.5. From its interface, I changed the new MX emails for my server.
The most important process was to get all the client’s emails from the old MTA to the new inbox in Google. I went to the Google Mail settings and put the smtp server for my old MTA with a slightly different change:
For instance, instead of email@domain.com, I put email@test.domain.com. Using the same credentials however, I was able to fetch all the emails from the old server to the new inbox.
The second important thing was to make the form mails to work. After everything worked, the form mail in the website was still mailing the old mail server instead of the new one. This happened because the website was using the sendmail to send the email. The last step was to turn the old MTA off. That made everything working.
Please leave your questions/comment about this post.